Writer of wrongs

Sunday

Nov 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMNov 30, 2008 at 11:19 AM

JACKSON, Miss. -- Julia Wright paces the floor outside the library at Lanier High School, a public place of learning in a neighborhood of neat, modest homes and the occasional building tagged with graffiti.

JACKSON, Miss. -- Julia Wright paces the floor outside the library at Lanier High School, a public place of learning in a neighborhood of neat, modest homes and the occasional building tagged with graffiti.

The slender 66-year-old greets about three dozen teenagers who have come to the library to hear a talk about her father, Richard Wright -- whose powerful, controversial novels helped put a face on racism in the United States, making him still one of the most widely read American authors almost a half-century after his death.

She encourages the youngsters to follow his example.

"Always ask questions. Always turn things around and look at all facets. Always look at the flip side," she tells the students, some of whom lean forward, elbows on tables, to absorb her words about a man who attended Lanier decades ago.

This year marks the centennial of Wright's birth, and his daughter, who lives in Paris, is traveling the globe to honor her father's literary legacy.

Richard Wright conferences, lectures and public readings are taking place in many cities, including his native Mississippi. The state was once one of the most grotesquely oppressive in the nation, and Wright -- a bright young black man with a gift for words -- had to leave so he could thrive.

His works, including the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 autobiography Black Boy, exposed and challenged the deeply entrenched system of racial injustice in 20th-century America.

Black Boy was a best-seller shortly after its release, and Native Son was the Book of the Month Club's first selection by a black author.

Jerry W. Ward Jr., a Wright scholar at Dillard University in New Orleans, said he was "one of the first African-American writers to really challenge a larger American readership."

Native Son shocked World War II-era America and still jolts readers today. The protagonist, a black man named Bigger Thomas, lives in Chicago and is pummeled by a society structured to oppress black people. Thomas loses control of his life after he accidentally kills a wealthy white woman.

Ward said that in Wright's works, "We discover that the entire nation, through institutions and social habits, might be responsible for major problems."

Wright was born Sept. 4, 1908, on a farm near Natchez, a Mississippi River town with a tourist trade that still centers on elaborate antebellum planters' homes. He was the grandson of former slaves and son of a schoolteacher mother and illiterate sharecropper father.

In a sign of how times have changed, the Mississippi Legislature voted this year to name a road near Natchez for him, just in time for a literary festival to honor his work.

In 1945, Theodore Bilbo, a U.S. senator and Mississippi demagogue, denounced Black Boy in the Senate.

In Black Boy, Wright recounts the upbringing he endured from the various relatives with whom he lived, including his mother and a grandmother who was a strict Seventh-day Adventist. After his father abandoned the family, Wright skipped from home to home in Memphis, Tenn., rural Arkansas and Mississippi.

Because of the frequent moves, his formal education was sporadic, but he developed an early love of the written word.

As a youngster living in a segregated society, he borrowed a library card from a sympathetic white man and forged notes from the man so the librarian would allow Wright to check out books.

In 1925, he attended the then-new Lanier High School but never graduated. (The school has since moved to a different location, but even decades after court-ordered desegregation, the school is all black, reflecting the surrounding neighborhood.)

Wright became a published author after moving to Chicago, where, in 1939, he met Ellen Poplar, a Communist Party member who was the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants. She became Wright's first wife and the mother of his two daughters -- Julia, who was born in the United States, and Rachel, who was born after Wright moved his family to Paris in 1947.

On her father's 100th birthday, Julia sat down for an interview at the Fairview Inn near downtown Jackson. The stately white-columned home was once owned by the former head of the Citizens Council -- an uptown version of the Ku Klux Klan that worked to preserve segregation in Mississippi decades ago.

The family left the United States, Julia said, after her father attacked Jim Crow society.

"He realized when he wrote Black Boy that he would have to fear for his family's safety down South because of what he wrote," she said.

Her father had also left the Communist Party and was being pressured from two sides: Party members were trying to pull him back in and federal investigators were trying to force him to provide inside information about the party, she said.

But a humiliating incident involving a 3-year-old Julia also caused the family to turn its back on America.

In 1945, a friend of the Wrights, a white woman named Connie, took Julia shopping at an upscale New York department store. The little girl needed to use the restroom, and Connie asked a salesclerk for directions.

"The saleslady behind the counter said to Connie, 'The restroom is over there.' But when Connie removed herself from the counter, I appeared," Julia Wright recalled. "Because I was so small, I was hidden by the counter. And she saw me, and I was brown. . . . And the saleslady said, 'Oh, no, not her. You, but not her.'

"So, Connie told me to be a 'good little girl' and go relieve myself on the sidewalk."

Later, at home, Connie told Richard Wright what had happened; the child was in another room playing.

"All of a sudden, I heard this howl of anger," Julia recalled. "I think my father must've become like Bigger (the enraged central character of Black Boy) at that time."

Walter Dean Myers, a prolific writer for young readers and two-time National Book Award finalist, said Wright's works and characters such as Bigger Thomas illuminated a horrific part of American life that few tried to correct in the decades before the civil-rights movement.

"What he did was to open a door to black life in America, treating it very seriously, where previous to that it was not being treated seriously," Myers said.

"You had the whole Harlem Renaissance period. But by the '40s, that was over and gone," he said. "The black person as a person who protested and as a person who was a keen observer of American life -- you did not have that until you had Richard Wright."

Julia was an adolescent before she read one of her father's books.

"He allowed me to discover that he was famous not by telling me he was famous but by actually allowing me to discover it. Because what does famous mean, after all? I mean, he didn't want to turn me into a snob," she said.

Wright died in Paris in November 1960, and his ashes are interred at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, the burial place of other literary greats, including his friend Gertrude Stein.

Earlier this year, a previously unpublished novel by Wright, A Father's Law, was released with an introduction by his daughter. In June, several literary expatriates gathered at Pere Lachaise to pay tribute to the author of Black Boy and Native Son.

Paper flowers with poems that celebrate the author written on them were available at the grave site.

"People would read it and then go and lay the paper flower down," Julia recalled. "Anonymous people who don't know him could read the flowers. It was beautiful."